Author Archives: Will

Photograph by Hervé Guibert The Author Function and the Artist Machine: The tension between anonymity and ascription—perhaps for a surreptitiously good reason—remains somewhat philosophically under-examined. It is latent in those becomings and gestures marked out as “imperceptibility” and “refusal”. There have been treatises on “improper names,” “the propaganda of the deed,” and even the “unattributed”Continue reading “Neutralizing Creation”

“Reason is not just the movements and actions of rational structures, but the movements of the structures and mechanisms of power. Reason is what sets aside madness. Reason is what gives itself the right and means to set aside madness.”Michel Foucault, 1978 “Of the Foolish…” The Crito is simultaneously an account of political right andContinue reading “The Prudence of Polity: City and Sanity”

This is an essay that speaks to the to the issues posed in “Going Astray” and “Thought, Disability, and Refusal” with an explicit focus on the political framing of the assemblage of things. It is the third essay in a set of interventions on, for lack of a better word, straying. None of these thingsContinue reading “Ecologies of Control”

Capability and Errancy One of the final pieces Michel Foucault was able to complete for publication before his death was an homage to his beloved teacher, Georges Canguilhem. It was published both in a French metaphysics journal and as the introduction to the English translation of Canguilhem’s seminal text, The Normal and the Pathological. InContinue reading “Going Astray”

Risks and Boundaries There is a vital, deeply political, aberrant movement called for in Difference & Repetition that is, in a certain sense, a metaphysical revolutionary gambit. It is the destruction of the dogmatic image of thought which presupposes its own foundational principles. Attempting to apprehend thought outside of this doxa, to move away fromContinue reading “Thought, Disability, and Refusal”

We are so terribly ill. Our ailment is enervating, though we are astir. It leaves us completely constricted, but perpetually frenzied and almost always restless. We do everything and go nowhere, do nothing and go everywhere. The tissue of our bodies tenses up and loosens exactly as expected. A refined symptom, to be sure. Though,Continue reading “Writhe, Moan”

The Weight of a Canon: While the likes of Mill and Bentham were erecting moral schemata, governments of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were using these same constructions of utility and value to discipline and organize populations. However, there were key operative distinctions. The maximization of utility did not come down to examining relationsContinue reading “The Echoes of Utility and the Rumblings of Disability”

(this is a reworked section of a larger piece) Confessions of the Self in Butler’s Reading of Foucault: Judith Butler, in their beautifully written Giving an Account of Oneself, posits that Foucault changed his political tune between volume 1 of his History of Sexuality and volume 3. “In the last years of his life, FoucaultContinue reading “A Brief Note on the Confession”

Habermas Contra Foucault In the “contemporary history of philosophy”, the Habermas-Foucault debate is most likely overrepresented, given the two never directly interacted on the matters present. However, it is a crucial element of Jürgen Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse on Modernity. It is important to note that, in his Foucault lectures, Habermas is heavily reliant on HubertContinue reading “Habermas, Foucault, and the Communicating Subject”

Sade and Dialectic of Enlightenment The Enlightenment has a despotic, totalizing tendency to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. There must always be a common denominator in instrumental reason. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence” (Adorno & Horkheimer 1992, 51). All mystifications, cultural codes, bodies, and motions share the same referent under the grip of theContinue reading “Sade, Adorno, and Ressentiment”